I am an avid OneNote user. I’ve been using Microsoft OneNote for several years, and it’s a must-have application for me. It helps me stay organized amid the chaos of competing priorities, fast-moving projects, and a busy family. In the meantime Microsoft has been making serious investments into OneNote, making it available across several mobile platforms and integrating it with OneDrive and SharePoint Online. The OneNote user experience is now quite smooth between mobile and desktop, and the value proposition for OneNote has never been greater.

At the same time, when I look around I see that many individuals and organizations have access to OneNote (it comes preinstalled with several flavors of Microsoft Office and the mobile app is free). However, they’re not using it to capture notes or organize their information. They’re not using a competing product, either. For most people, pen & paper is still the preferred method for taking notes. Information arriving electronically is captured in email or in folders or documents which makes it difficult to find information and keep it updated. For many people, things that they know or want to keep are spread across multiple sources and repositories, and it takes a lot of mental effort to find and retrieve information. Old habits die hard, I suppose…

Our mission here at ITKM Systems is to help our clients capture and organize their informal knowledge assets. OneNote provides a great platform for accomplishing this goal. Over the next few months, you will see some new content on this blog related to how to leverage OneNote for best results and achieve maximum productivity. We will be spending more time with OneNote, figuring out the best layouts, the best templates and the best ways to capture, organize, and retrieve your knowledge.

Attempting to move a SharePoint site using Powershell cmdlet Move-SPSite and getting the following error:

Invalid object name ‘WSS_Content.dbo.AllSites’.

This error occurs because the database schema between the source database and the target database is different. In my case, the source database was hosted on SQL Server 2008 R2, and the destination database was on SQL Server 2012 SP3. I solved the problem as follows:

Create a new content database on the source SQL Server.

Use Move-SPSite cmdlet to move your SharePoint site into the new DB.

Using SQL Server Management Studio, back up the new content DB to a file and copy it to the destination SQL Server.

Ok, so this is not going to be a SharePoint or technology-related post.. Two days ago, a Malaysian Airlines flight Mh17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine by pro-Russian rebels. This strikes close to home for me because I was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and emigrated to the U.S. in 1991. I’ve been following the news of the crash (and prior to that, the proxy war that Russian has been waging in eastern Ukraine). I put together a video tribute to the victims of this awful tragedy – see links below. As one U.S. intelligence official put it, “Let’s hope that this leads Vladimir Putin to a moment of sanity.” Our prayers are with the victims and their families..

Concept Searching, a company specializing in advanced semantic metadata generation, auto-classification, and taxonomy management, has posted a whitepaper dealing with SharePoint and Office 365 Metadata survey that they conducted between November 2013 and February 2014. They received 396 completed surveys from companies that use SharePoint as a collaboration platform in one form or another. As I read through the survey, I found a few interesting results:

Office 365 has been deployed by 34% of organizations, and another 21% have plans to deploy O365 in the future. 30% of respondents have no plans to deploy O365. These numbers seem to suggest that Office 365 is gaining traction among customers – in the near future, over half of SharePoint customers could be using O365.

On the list of upcoming challenges and priorities, text analytics was rated as the highest priority item (86%). Content management was rated lowest (42%). This was surprising to me as I expected that most clients would see content management as a high priority item.

Information Governance: 45% of respondents indicated that there was no information governance plan in their organization. For a consultant, this presents both a challenge and an opportunity. There is clearly a need for information governance services in the marketplace; however, the service offering must be clear and compelling enough to motivate the customers to move forward on it.

You can read the entire whitepaper (with many other interesting results) here:

While installing SharePoint 2010 Server Service Pack 2 update (and December 2013 CU), I ran into the following error while executing SharePoint Configuration Wizard:

Exception: System.IO.InvalidDataException: The web configuration file, C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\config\WEBCONFIG.ACCSRV.XML, does not have element “configuration/configSections/sectionGroup[@name=’SharePoint’]” or it is invalid.

My troubleshooting steps:

1. Some online posts suggested removing all comments from the affected web applications. I tried it, but it did not work.

Error # 1: An exception of type Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPUpdatedConcurrencyException was thrown. Additional exception information: An update conflict has occurred, and you must re-try this action.

Error # 2: Exception: Microsoft.SharePoint.Upgrade.SPUpgradeException: Action 4.0.21.0 of Microsoft.SharePoint.Upgrade.SPIisWebSiteWssSequence failed. —> System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

5. Re-ran psconfig command from step 2 above. This time, a new error showed up:

Application Resource Web Config for this IIS site (524709402) could not be found at (path)\wwwroot\wpresources\web.config.

6. It looks like the web.config file for this site is corrupt and needs to be re-created.

7. First, back up the IIS directory in question (including the web.config file).

8. Next, remove the IIS site using Central Admin: Central Admin > Web Application Management > Click on the web application > In the ribbon, click on the “Delete” button drop-down and select “Remove SharePoint from IIS website”. Select the appropriate site in the next dialog and make sure to select “Delete IIS websites”.

9. Re-extend the web application and re-create the IIS site. In CA Web Application management, click on the web application, then click on “Extend” button in the ribbon and fill out the appropriate fields. Click OK.

10. Make sure that the IIS site is accessible and working as expected.